May 27th, 2009
Bartz can carry a room; Can she carry Yahoo?
Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz sure can carry a room—especially the crowd at the D7 conference. The formula: Drop an F-bomb, talk Dilbert, mock the silos at Yahoo and tease us about a search deal with Microsoft if there are big dollars involved. Next step: Do something about the sources of those punch lines.
Bartz has managed to set Twitter afire with one-liners—some of them previously heard on Yahoo’s conference calls.
One Twitter sums up the Kara Swisher-Bartz interview:
1 F-Bomb, a Knee Touch, a dismissive CEO about the shifting start page landscape to Twitter, Facebook, WordPress
From John Paczkowski’s live coverage (along with a good Twitter recap):
- On Bartz reaction when Jerry Yang approached her about the Yahoo gig for the second time: “I said well Jerry, why don’t you draw me an org chart … and he pulls an org chart out of the closet and starts drawing Yahoo’s org. He drew arrows everywhere. It looked like a Dilbert cartoon.”
- Bartz says Yahoo is too silo-ed. Example: The home page battles over Yahoo Finance and Sports.
- There are 38 different code bases for the Yahoo home page.
- On the Microsoft question, Bartz said she’d sell Yahoo search if there’s enough dough involved. Bartz: “If there’s boatloads of money and the right technology involved would be do a deal, sure. It’s that simple. They’d have to have biiiiig boatloads of money, though.”
The solution for these woes: Grown-up management. Bartz says you can’t take 9 women and make a baby in a month. That’s shorthand for saying Yahoo needs some more time to bake.
For what it’s worth: Bartz took over Yahoo Jan. 13. Let’s call it a little less than four months before this baby is baked and the quips stop working—maybe.
Roll the tape:
Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and Editorial Director of ZDNet sister site TechRepublic. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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